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After an intense (and long) process of certification of my remote control application on the Windows Phone MarketPlace, the app has been accepted !

You can find the app on the MarketPlace, and it is simply called "Remote Control" for PowerPoint. The application has been published in the US English market for now, and if you're not in the US, just choose the US English in the "World View" at the bottom.

The published app is only a sort of test run for me, and only has the capability to control PowerPoint. I'll be adding more controllable applications in the future, depending on the market reception of the app.

As I previous said in this blog, here are the new features and enhancement of this new version :

Improved performance

Support for High DPI and VGA devices

Windows 7 support

64 Bits compatibility

Support for Wifi, which is more marketing abuse, and is actually TCP support

Support for touch screen devices, those who do not have enough hardware keys

The US English market is the only available market, for now. Other markets are still waiting to be approved, and will be :

Canada, UK, India, Australia for English

France and Canada for the French localized version

The french part certification is somewhat obscure for me, and I expecting certification surprises...

I'll also add Portugese and Spanish version in a near future.

If you were waiting for this new version, visit http://jaylee.org/rc and please let me know what you think !

The long standing last release 0.9.0 has been out for a while now, more than a year and a half. It’s been downloaded a lot, over 150.000 times.

I’m not sure about the actual usage, but judging by the steady flow of comments and suggestions I’m receiving, I’m guessing quite a few people are using it.

Since the middle of october, Microsoft has pushed out its Marketplace for Windows Mobile, I have decided that I will be giving a try to this method of publication. The software will not be free this time, but it will be at a price that will not break the bank. I’ll leave the current free application available, but I will not update it anymore. I’m sure that this new paid version will disapoint some of the current users, but that’s a “price” to pay and I’m willing to take that risk.

I’m hoping that the marketplace will broaden the audience, and the app will be available at first in french, english, spanish and portuguese.

About the new features and enhancement of this new version :

Wifi support for all the users that do not have a bluetooth hardware

Improved performance

Support for High DPI and VGA devices

Windows 7 support, obviously

64 Bits compatibility

I’m also planning on improving the “touch” support, since the app was originally designed for devices that had many hardware keys, back in 2003. Most recent devices hardly have any hardware keys, and for good reasons.

Two small errors have slipped into the configuration file of version 0.9.0, preventing it from controlling Windows Media Center. Since it is a rather small update, as this is only the application definition file that is modified, I did not increase the version number.

So, if you downloaded the 0.9.0 version before this post was published and if you use Windows Media Center, you may want to download it again.

This time, I've added two features that were requested for a long time, which are the ability to control application that I did not include out of the box, and the ability to use the device as a simple mouse and keyboard device.

About the first part, there is now a configuration file that allows the addition of new applications by defining each and every command that can be used on the mobile side, and their corresponding action. I intentionally did not comment the file, this is not meant to be modified by a standard user, but rather by an experienced user or developer that wants to control a custom application. The configuration file will hopefully be really simple to understand for a developer. So, if you understand how this file works, just feel free to add a new application, or update an existing if it does not fit your needs.

Now about the part with the keyboard and mouse. I added a new "application" which actually is not, which is basically a pass-through for mouse and keyboard actions. You'll be able to move your mouse and type in any key you want in the focused window. On my TyTN II, the key mapping is a bit funky when using the function key, but I'll try to fix that for a future release.

Both features are fairly stable, but I suspect minor issues to come up as users are using it. Feel free to comment !

This is one of the biggest missing features of VPC 2007, the lack of USB passthrough support. The lack of a proper snapshot feature is annoying too, even though it is possible to move Undo Disks to simulate snapshots. But I still prefer VPC 2007 over VMWare, mainly because I find the latter to be too intrusive and unstable...

Anyway, I was looking for any update to VPC 2007 for the support of USB devices, in one form or another, maybe with a beta VPC 2008 or 2009. This is still not happening but, I came across this software, Usb over Network, which does exactly what I need to do.

This software is particularly easy to install, and it works right after being installed. I'm able to "export" my integrated USB Bluetooth dongle to the VPC, and it works like a charm ! I'm able to run both bluetooth stacks in controlled environments, without crippling my main OS with multiple stacks.

A really nice software, not free, but really useful if you're depending on USB hardware and you want to test it in a virtual environment.

There's been a lot of Buzzlately about a "Windows Workstation 2008", which actually does not quite exist, but that should. It is actually installing Windows Server 2008 and making it a workstation platform, by enabling every workstation component that is disabled by default.

From my point of view, Vista is definitely interesting, though it has too many services that are enabled by default and that do not make sense in every situation. For a computer savvy user, all this stuff is not really interesting, and Windows Server 2008 with its "do not enable unused components" policy, is quite interesting.

I decided to give it a shot by installing it as my main (and only) laptop OS, and quite frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised ! I do get the same user experience that I did have with Windows Vista with Aero, the nifty new features like the new start menu, and I seem to get a performance improvement over Vista. (Performance improvement is only a feeling; I don't have any numbers to show, though some did).

Everything works as expected, except for the bluetooth part, for which I do not seem to be the only one having problem with. The microsoft stack does not seem to install completely, as there are three "unknown devices" left : BTH\MS_RFCOMM, BTH\MS_BTHBRB and BTH\MS_BTHPAN. All three of them are core components of the bluetooth stack, and are obiously needed to get bluetooth related software working properly. The interesting part is that there are actually all the driver and metadata files required to install these devices, but for some reason, Win2008 does not want to use them. The driver files seem to be identical to the files Vista SP1, so this is one bit of a mystery to me. Added to that, this installation issue seems to be related to the KB940199 where the infcache.1 file could not be found. Screwing with that file did not help either...

So as a backup plan, I decided to fall back on the Widcomm/Broadcom Stack with this guide, which seems to work fine, at least for the part I'm interested in, Bluetooth Remote Control . I still don't understand the licensing policy on this software... You need the hardware to get that software to work, why bother having an licensing scheme over this, haven't you already paid for it buying the hardware ?

Fixing mobile side crash when tapping on the screen in some situations

Adding a more explicit message when the Bluetooth Stack is not supported on the Mobile Side.

I'm also considering a migration to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, but this means that I'll have to drop the support for WM 2003 based devices. VS2008 does not allow the compilation of .NET CF 1.0 projects, which bugs me a bit. So this release might be the last to support WM2003 devices. I don't have much of choice either... .NET 3.5 muses are quite appealing !

If you ever want to install the Broadcom stack on WM6 for the HTC Wizard and you get a "Not enough driver memory", try changing the "StackMode" value from "0" to "1" in HKLM/Widcomm/BTConfig/General. It worked out for me :)

Cloud

About me

My name is Jerome Laban, I am a Software Architect, C# MVP and .NET enthustiast from Montréal, QC. You will find my blog on this site, where I'm adding my thoughts on current events, or the things I'm working on, such as the Remote Control for Windows Phone.